Brainshark is not just an AppExchange partner, the firm is also one of the world’s most prolific users of AppExchange applications. Under Gustafson’s leadership, Brainshark has pioneered on-demand business communications with more than 1,000 corporate customers, including a third of the Fortune 100. We recently interviewed Gustafson for a feature article; the following are highlights of that conversation.

Selling Power (SP): What’s the genesis of Brainshark?
Joe Gustafson (JG): Brainshark is the second company I started. The first was a computer-based training firm that worked with technology companies such as Oracle. We would take their classroom material and convert it into e-learning modules. The drawback of that approach was that it was expensive to build the content and cost as much as $50,000 to build one course. After I sold that company, I realized that the business world needed an easier way to create multimedia instructional material and publish it on the Web.

SP: Why was that important?
JG: Research shows that people retain only 10 percent of what they hear and only 20 percent of what they see, but if the two are combined – hearing and seeing – they retain as much as 65 percent. Unfortunately, trying to get that combination was prohibitively expensive, requiring videographers, programmers, and so forth. We therefore decided to build an application with which users could easily generate their own visual content and then add voiceover with a telephone. And to keep costs down, we decided to offer that capability as a service on the Web.

SP: How does Brainshark differ from recorded Web conferences?
JG: Web conferencing is a useful technology, but it takes place in real time. Web conferences thus tend to take at least a half-hour, even if the information provided could be expressed in a much shorter period of time. With Brainshark, it’s more like creating and editing a presentation. You can cut out slides and the voiceover connected with it. You can redo your voiceover until it’s just what you want. As a result, Brainshark presentations tend to be tighter, more informative, and frankly more useful than recorded Web conferences.

SP: How popular is Brainshark?
JG: Brainshark distributes 8 million minutes of content every month. If that were a single stream, it would take 64 years’ worth of workdays to play from end to end. We currently serve more than 1,000 organizations, and our revenues are doubling year to year. We originally believed that our market would be in corporate training, but we’ve discovered that many of our customers use Brainshark for sales and marketing. The ability to create customized, on-demand presentations makes it easier for customers to develop opportunities and close business faster.

SP: How is your sales team organized to use technology?
JG: It consists of approximately 40 sales pros separated into inside and outside sales. The inside sales group conducts telephone sales targeting small to medium businesses. The outside sales group is structured into teams of six to seven sales reps headed by a director, who in turn reports to the vice president of sales. These outside teams are focused on specific industries, such as financial services and health insurance, and sell primarily to large enterprises.

SP: What AppExchange products do you use?
JG: We’re heavy users of salesforce.com and use numerous applications that integrate with it. We’ve ended up building and integrating a whole set of tools that span everything from email marketing to event management to lead generation to proposal management. And, of course, we’re heavy users of our own product. Because it’s integrated into salesforce.com, salespeople can select a presentation that marketing created, make changes, provide feedback from customers, etc. As a result, the presentations keep getting stronger and more effective as sales tools.

SP: What do you do to get your customers up to speed?
JG: We have learning applications that help train people to use Brainshark. We have a "customer connection" Website where customers can get tips, tricks, and best practices, and they can dialog with other customers. We also have a service in which we’ll review a customer presentation and provide tips and tricks to make it better. Finally, we’ve just launched a new, free site, www.mybrainshark.com, which has tutorials on how to use Brainshark effectively.